Close Quarters
by ruth baulding
Summary: Distance makes the heart grow fonder, and vice versa, when an edgy ex-Sith assassin and a battered Jedi master find themselves sharing some quality time together. Perverse epilogue to CW episode "Revenge."
1. Chapter 1

**Close Quarters**

* * *

**1.**

Asaaj Ventress propped her booted feet up on the battered portside console and leaned back in the soft-padded chair. The cockpit – now escape capsule – was claustrophobically small. Too small to contain both herself and Kenobi. Outside the viewport, the stars wheeled, but did not blur; they had no hyperdrive capacity beyond the initial jump which took them out of the Brothers' reach. That convenient getaway effected, they had no choice but to limp on sublight emergency thrusters to the nearest inhabitable system.

She hoped it was in neutral space, or failing that, Hutt controlled. Or, better yet, Separatist territory. That would make things difficult for the Jedi.

Because Asaaj wasn't stupid, and she knew that the moment they landed – be it in spaceport, orbital docking station, or wilderness, the truce would end. The spontaneous, desperation-forged alliance which had brought them this far – more or less intact – would promptly dissolve into the cherished rituals of enmity. She would rather Kenobi not be on his own turf when that happened; bruised and battered or not, he was still quite a handful.

And they both had their 'sabers.

She caressed the curving handles of her own pair, now strapped within easy reach, one upon either shapely thigh. She crossed her legs again, reflecting that her obscenely proportioned curves _should_ be enough to rouse a dead gundark…. And yet, the man sitting in the pilot's seat, spitting distance away, never even seemed to notice. The arrogant _barve._

He didn't even acknowledge that she had once tortured him to the brink of death and madness. In his smugly uncommunicative posture there was dismissal – contempt for their shared history. How could a man _forget_ a thing like that? How could a man _forgive_ a thing like that? Asaaj hadn't forgotten _him… _ perhaps when she found him all but unconscious on the decks of Maul's ship, she should have issued a tart reminder of his _obligations _ to her. A backhanded slap across the face had merely brought him back to reluctant awareness; what she should have done was brand him with the memory of her dominance, that delicious span of captivity in which he could not taunt her with his affected indifference.

She should have kissed him, long and deep, until he woke up choking on her hot breath. _Damn it to the nine hells – _why hadn't she thought of that in the moment? Her tattooed lips curled lasciviously, lingering in the imagined act. She tightened her already adamantine shields a bit further and hunkered down into the fantasy's warm nexus. After all, it was going to be long, long trip…and the company wasn't much company.

"Is that really _necessary?"_ Kenobi complained, in his lovely growl, not even bothering to open his eyes or turn around.

_Ooops_. Some images were more easily projected than others. She ran the tip of her tongue over her slightly parted teeth, leaned back to survey him from under half-lidded eyes. "Go back to your meditation, Obi Wan dear," she purred. "You can keep your precious Light side company… I've got other things to keep me warm."

"This is going to be a very tedious trip, isn't it?" he grumbled, more to himself than to her. He sounded dead tired. It suited him. But then, most things did.

She chuckled low in her throat. "Stop griping, or I'll think about something even _more_ interesting."

She watched the Jedi's shoulders tense – an infinitesimal twist of muscle beneath the smudged and filthy cloth of his tabards – and stretched back deeper into the molded chair's contours. A moment ago, she would have agreed with him. But now, she mused, the journey did not have to be so very dreary after all. She could wait until they made groundfall, wherever that might be. For now, trapped in a claustrophobically small space with the unlikeliest of companions, Asaaj decided that she could just enjoy the…scenery.

* * *

Obi Wan weighed options, keeping his back turned to the salacious witch lounging in the comsat seat just behind him. She was projecting her …_whatever_ that was… so vibrantly that every Sensitive in a six parsec radius must be feeling the sultry disturbance in the Force. He constructed another mental barrier between himself and her fetid imaginary frolicking and studied the nav readout.

It was lean pickings out here. Separatist interests controlled most the inhabitable systems; one or two technically neutral space stations hung isolated between _here, _and _there…_ and there was a Hutt-owned asteroid belt, a mining operation circling a dying star. That would never do. No matter where they eventually settled, he would be hard put to make it out again alive, and it would be reckless folly to summon a Republic ship to such a compromised rendezvous. He was on his own, with two broken ribs, sundry other internal injuries, and a most uncooperative assassin whom he intended to arrest and drag – kicking, screaming, and leering – all the way to the nearest high security holding cell, preferably one known only to the Order.

Assuming he could still best her in a 'saber contest, given his current condition.

Well, of _course_ he could take Asaaj Ventress hand to hand, even if he were a little worse for wear. Couldn't he? Unarmed, opposed only in the Force and sheer physical strength, he could _certainly_ teach her a lesson never to be forgotten…show her who was the master-

_Blast it._ He snuffed the thought out of existence, with the ruthless skill of a life-long ascetic. If her phantasmagoria could penetrate his mental shields _that_ easily, he likely had a concussion, on top of the other inconveniences plaguing his sore body. It seemed more than possible, considering the abuse Maul and his hulking brother had inflicted on him in the course of their prolonged conversation.. He heard Ventress' throaty chuckle of enjoyment at his irritation, her perverse mirroring of his reactions, so that annoyance was reflected in her dark soul as amusement, pain as pleasure, agony as ecstasy. A ghostly shred of memory wafted its way up out of the past's graveyard, a phantom echo of Jabiim, and he quashed that unruly mental impulse, too, forcing his gaze up and out the viewport to the glittering field of stars, tugging vexedly at his beard.

Despite the aggravating nature of her presence, there was no doubt that Ventress had somehow _changed. _ He could sense it. On Jabiim she had been a black hole, an imploded star sucking Light into itself, endlessly ravenous, preternaturally Dark. But now… inexplicably, but undeniably… she was merely Gray. Clouded, dimmed, hollowed out by a merciless scouring wind, the husk left over when the Dark was finished feasting.

He felt pity. He wished, if it were possible, to …what? See her redeemed?

Why was that so important to him? Or should he rather ask, why was it so _necessary_ to him? What did it mean, what deep assurance did he crave under the veil of that impossible event, the restoration of one so far fallen? Some buried instinct cried out for confirmation of this possibility, a small voice nearly smothered by the silent menace of some near, yet indiscernible future, that evolving tapestry into which his nightmares were woven, more and more darkly with each passing year.

"Keep brooding," her softly rasping voice purred at him, husky and smooth in the cockpit's tight confines. "It's _lovely."_

He clenched his teeth, noting with a renewed flare of irritation that one of his molars was loose. The decision where to land seemed suddenly a very simple one indeed: the closest planet, moon, space station or barren asteroid would be quite sufficient, and the sooner the better. It mattered little who or what controlled it, in the end. After all, it hadn't been his day for warm welcomes.


	2. Chapter 2

**Close Quarters**

* * *

**2.**

As the Force would have it, the nearest inhabited system was a battlefield.

Asaaj snapped to attention, uncoiling from her languid sprawl in a heartbeat, eyes intently studying the panoply of warships and flittering fighter drones arrayed over the inmost planet's upper atmosphere. Red and blue energy packets howled through space, thousands of intersecting trajectories painting a pretty picture of ionized plasmic destruction. Fire bloomed and was extinguished in the void; fragments elegantly fell into the planet's gravity well and burned to a crisp in the stratosphere. The Force churned and writhed with death, with hatred, with desperation. Her skin tingled.

Kenobi noticed, too. And then he was making a move for the comm-sat console, slipping behind her, anticipating her objection, ducking beneath the blow she aimed at his head.

'No you don't!" she shrieked, ramming her boot between his hand and the flat touch-screen control panel.

He raised a hand, threw her across the cockpit, into the pilot's chair.

Asaaj was not about to permit him to summon Republic aid. In the next heartbeat, her two blades were spitting to life, vibrant red beams spitting ferociously in the close space. Kenobi was armed and blocking her strike before the red sabers had even fully extended. Blue smashed into parallel red lines, spat harsh light over both their faces. They struggled, pushing against one another.

"Don't be a fool, Ventress," the Jedi scoffed. "You've no allies here. Dooku doesn't seem to want you anymore. You're better off coming quietly."

"With _you?"_ she spat, disengaging and coming under his guard, sweeping backward at him, wildly, just to keep him at a distance, hands scrabbling over the comm-sat panel in her turn.

A Force-shove rammed her shoulders into the bulkhead. Her saber carved a line through the console, shorting out a few circuits. An alarm sounded, strident bleeping a new voice in the blended growling of three lightsabers.

Kenobi made another attempt to activate the comm equipment, but she locked his blade in a high bind and twisted, catching him in the chest with one booted heel and sending him flipping backwards out of range, his spine coming up hard against the viewport. Their ship hurtled onward, toward the raging battle. She buried her weapons in the nav console, the communications equipment, the weapons targeting system, wreaking grim havoc. _Nobody _ was getting help here.

Kenobi threw her into the sealed panels at the cockpit's aft. Her bald skull met the hard durasteel with a resounding thud, a sudden blackness that eclipsed sensation and thought for a full three count. When her head cleared, she was launching herself at the Jedi's back again, tearing the yoke out of his hands, wrapping one arm tight about his neck even as he stood and turned her over his shoulder.

The ship lurched downward. They tumbled with it, rolling across the ceiling, the back wall, the floor. Saber hilts rolled and tumbled in mid air, rattled against the bulkheads, the deck. Kenobi sprang for the pilot's chair, but Asaaj intercepted him. They collided, limbs tangling, bodies compacted into a furious stalemate.

The ship rolled, out of control, spinning in the atmosphere. She hung on, knees locked around the Jedi's legs, one arm around his neck, one elbow _crushed _ in his defensive lock, ribs aching where he sought to lever himself free of her constrictor's hold, their faces a mere centimeter apart, teeth bared, eyes flashing mutual outrage, breath mingling hot and rapid.

They fell, plummeted sickeningly toward the distant surface. Kenobi thrashed his way halfway free, pummeled her with one knee and both fists, rolled his way to the forward controls and pulled back on the yoke again. The ship groaned, twisted violently to one side and then plunged down sickeningly, tossing them like rag dolls against opposite bulkheads, tearing its way through a sudden impact, an obliterating cacophany tearing through eardrums, flesh, metal, air.

The Force saved them; Dark and Light went up together in a conflagration of power, a sudden rushing of instinct, life outrunning death, a gold-black radiant emptiness shielding them from certain annihilation. The ship came to a stop, buried nose-down in white nothingness, and Asaaj came to rest atop her foe, her body splayed out, breathless, over his entire length, face to face.

She seized the opportunity to teach the Jedi a lesson. Fingers twisted in his forelock, she jerked his skull backward against the unyielding surface below them and planted her mouth against his, _taking_ what the kriffing barve would not yield, then biting his lower lip hard enough to draw hot, salty blood.

It was worth the resulting kick in the gut . She landed a meter away, winded, licking the crimson droplets off her own lips, chortling throatily. "Damn you, Kenobi," she smiled.

* * *

Obi Wan swiped the back of one hand across his mouth, scowling when it came away smeared with bright red. Ventress was crouched against the opposite bulkhead, and now that he eased himself upright, he could see they were in fact sitting upon the cockpit's roof, its scuffed deck inverted above their heads, the greater part of the consoles and computer banks sparking and blackened. Behind him, angled downward and fretted with hairline cracks, the viewport displayed nothing but a blank field of white, endless crystalline solidity.

Ice. In the final seconds of descent, he had glimpsed the planet's polar region whirling madly in a spiral beneath them. They must have ploughed into an ice floe. He supposed he should be grateful it hadn't been the arctic sea.

Rising carefully, wiping his damp beard and mouth again, he surveyed the damage. The cockpit, escape capsule, getaway ship – whatever one cared to call it – would clearly never fly again. And who was to say how deeply they were buried? The stillness and the white blankness beyond the viewport were disorienting. The Force still rang with the echoes of their battle. "Well," he addressed his silently glowering comrade. "_You_ make a fine back-seat pilot."

She shrugged diffidently at him and rolled her exotically slanted eyes.

He gritted his teeth and leaned on the upside-down forward console, not a single sensor or interface online. The struggle had taken its toll, not that he would share that information with Ventress. Breathing hurt. Standing hurt. Thinking hurt, for that matter. He wrenched the console's access panel open and fumbled with the mass of wiring, searching distractedly for the emergency beacon circuits.

"This is cozy," Ventress remarked acidly.

He found the requisite wires, fished a microtool out of his belt pouch, set about the mundane task. "Charming," he agreed. "The company is peerless." The emergency beacon blipped into life.

"Don't flatter yourself, Kenobi."

The life support needed checking over, too. If he could coax the heating unit and air cycler into cooperation, they might be able to survive here for…oh, days. A lovely prospect. He buried himself halfway inside the access panel. The components were all frustratingly upside down. "I hate flying," he muttered.

"Stop griping," the Sith witch barked. "I'm already sick of your whining."

He spared her a pointed look over one shoulder. "I _could _ extend that litany to include quite a few other aspects of our current predicament," he promised.

"I prefer you unconscious," she replied, coolly. "Or at least bound and gagged."

That didn't merit any response, so he made none, and simply rigged the failing life support systems as best he could. The back up generator was damaged, so there was no way to predict the longevity of his repairs. But the Force would provide a solution – or a rescue – in good time.

Finished, he tucked himself against the furthest bit of wall, an alcove beneath the dead console and the curving viewport, and reached through the thin walls of their makeshift fortress, questing in the Force. Above them, a vast stretch of ice. Below them, the same. On every side, a delicate balance of weight, of crushing mass. The tiny pod in which they were trapped was jammed between two monstrous glacial ridges, frozen mountains clashing in exquisite slow synchrony, creeping along their inevitable paths. This speck of metal, this hollow space caught in the pincer, could neither move nor survive the shifting of those colossal walls. They were trapped.

And to venture outside would be certain death, too. They had no supplies, no thermal gear, no provisions, nothing but the Force…oh. And each other. What a reassuring thought.

"Now what?" the disgruntled assassin demanded, sourly.

"Now we wait for a response to the beacon," he informed her, one eyebrow rising with his impatience. " And we see who it is that comes."

She eyed him warily, but said nothing. The tenuous alliance remained intact, for now.

He closed his eyes, and began the interminable wait.


	3. Chapter 3

**Close Quarters**

* * *

**3.**

Asaaj Ventress carried bacta with her. It only made sense for someone in her line of work. She caressed the tiny container, running long fingers over its contours. A medical miracle, even a Force-user might stand to benefit from its restorative powers. The sticky red glop danced a little inside its plastoid casing, promising swift healing.

Kenobi's eyes were closed – not that it meant anything. So many mental barriers stood between them, it would be impossible to know whether he were meditating, in a deep healing trance, or sound asleep, his inhuman stamina finally eroded by sheer exhaustion. His breathing suggested the fevered slumber of injury, of great strain. How long had he been captive to the Brothers' cruel whims before she had arrived on the scene? There was no way to know. It might have been a protracted ordeal.. and Force knew – Asaaj knew – what a stubborn pile of poodoo the Jedi was. He did not break easily.

She twisted the container's steri-seal cap off and inched forward. He was surely asleep, a faint frown of discomfort still contracting his brows, but his face otherwise still and peaceful. She knew every line of his face intimately – every inch of everything else, too. On Jabiim she had _owned_ him, laid bare every secret except that last and confounded one, the hidden fire deep in the Jedi's spirit, that inviolable place that would not _yield, _ not to the Dark, not to despair, not to desperate fear. It burned still, and in its ethereal flame there was mockery, the subtle taunt of the Light, whispering that her _ownership _ had been nothing, an illusion and a passing shadow play. Without the spirit, she could not truly claim the grosser matter.

Still, the Brothers had no right over what was hers. They had no right to _touch_ Kenobi, when he was hers to … do with as she would. The dried trickle of blood trailing stickily down his neck from the left ear was an affront to her sensibilities, as was the bruise rapidly darkening high on the Jedi's cheekbone, just beneath the single dark freckle. And what other sins had they committed, what other damage to her property? She seized Kenobi's tunic, where it crossed over itself, two pale wings furled over his inscrutable heart, then the earth-toned undertunic, its fabric crumpling into coarse folds where her fingers clawed at it, - and pulled.

"Don't touch me!" the Jedi snarled, one arm striking across the space between them, hard and fast. She blocked it, grasped at his opposite wrist, yowled as he twisted free, hit her elbow joint, and slewed halfway round in one fluid motion. She twisted with him, bringing her knee up into his belly, loving the _feel_ of that – the soft-hard thump of bone against taut muscle – and struck him in the lower rib, the one she knew was broken. He grunted, jerked backward a little, and rammed a fist under her solar plexus, winding her. She choked, crawled backward on her knees, remembering why she _hated_ him, and his arrogant disdain, and his incapacity to see anything beyond his Jedi platitudes and sanctimonious self-assurance.

He leaned against the bulkhead, panting heavily. Asaaj spat on the hard deck – former ceiling- between them. "I'm trying to _help_ you, you vaping wretch," she snarled, her lips drawn back over white teeth, sharply tattooed forehead compressed into deep gouges of disgust.

"I … that is _not_ necessary," he gasped. Pain warped the Force, and she reveled in it. She must have knocked the broken rib clear into his lung. He coughed a little, watching her with glittering blue eyes. His skin was pale, slicked with a fine sheen of sweat. Strands of hair, some sun-bleached, a few prematurely silver, curled damply against moist skin. She swallowed, watching in her turn. Stalemate.

She tossed the bacta container across the short space between them. "Fix your own damned self, then," she hissed, folding her arms and taking up sentinel position against the opposite side of the half-crushed cockpit. In the tiny glimmer of light from the emergency beacon, she watched him turn the small packet over in his fingers, scowling at it, jaw clenched tight in discomfort and resentment. His eyes flicked up at her suspiciously, then narrowed.

"Don't' be an idiot, Kenobi," she sneered. "You need it." And she was going to watch, and there was nothing he could do to stop her.

For a long minute she thought he would refuse the offer, out of spite.

"You don't need to be so modest with _me," _she reminded him, deriving exquisite enjoyment from the flare of hot memory, the burning surge of _power_ in the Force. Oh, hells, the man could have _crushed_ the Brothers had he so much as touched that Dark potential.

His eyebrows came together in patent disapproval and he turned his back to her. She smiled tightly, savoring the small but sweet victory. Belt off, saber laid across knees – of course. Tabards off. Outer tunic off. Ventress sucked in a breath. Better and better. Inner tunic off. Ah, yes. He was a beautiful mess – a patchwork of bruises and hard-knit muscle. He applied the bacta efficiently, silently.

"I'll do your back," she offered. The Jedi's spine slammed into absolute rigidity. One breath, two breaths.

"Very well," he grunted, with perfect ingratitude.

She scooted closer and made sure to protract the operation as long as possible, enjoying his palpable discomfort. Her hands strayed over every cut and contusion, every subtle plane and curve, tracing over vertebrae and ribs, shoulder blades, pale skin spattered with tiny freckles, the faintest brush of downy red-gold near the base of his spine. The bacta looked like dripping blood, like tears weeping from the touch of a shiv, of a whip, of her nails… she shuddered and raised a hand, seizing a handful of his hair and twisting hard, her heart hammering with dark pleasure.

"_Let go_," Kenobi growled, hand already curled about his saber's hilt.

"As you wish," she demurred, sliding away, chuckling at him, at his loss of composure, at her own daring. Delicious. Utterly delicious.

"And stay on your own side," he added, finally turning to face her. The rich, earth-brown tunic was roughly pulled into place, over sticky bacta, leaving damp stains against the fiber, patches of seeping red clinging to his flesh.

Asaaj sighed, a moist wafting of delectation. "I don't belong on your Side, anyhow," she assured him huskily.

"Clearly," he replied, sardonic as ever.

They lapsed into a silence, an armistice in which harrowing memory and present discomfort were laid aside, in which they rested, inward-furled, floating upon the supernal currents of the Force… one to either Side.

* * *

Obi Wan mentally catalogued his injuries, admitting to himself that the healers would eventually have to be involved. He _was_ grateful for the bacta; and also resentful that his gratitude should be merited by the Sith acolyte lying so uncomfortably close beside him in the mangled cockpit. At least Ventress' gimlet eyes were closed – not that it made much difference. He could still sense her predatory interest crawling over his body like the ravening march of fire beetles over some fresh-killed thing, feel her putrid fantasizing, redolent of the Dark.

He eased himself onto one side, exhaled. The Force. Focus. There was no such thing as accident or even ironic coincidence within the Force. Ventress and he had been thrust together into this unlikely alliance for a _purpose._ As a Jedi master, his duty was to discern and serve that purpose, without through of self. And it was a certainty that Ventress would never bother to ask what higher meaning might govern her destiny: her hollow core echoed with no resounding tone of submission. The Dark admitted only of slaves, puppets and tools. In its wide dominion there was no true and willing service. If the will Force was to be heard at all, if its strange and mysterious ways were to be upheld, then the burden of obedience would have to lay solidly upon his shoulders, and his alone.

"Stars end," he grumbled, shifting his weight slightly, and adding _possibly dislocated collarbone_ to the ever-lengthening list. The Brother's cruel and tattooed visages swam before his mind's eye, yellow and red marred by black scars, jagged sigils of hate mutilating their faces, engraved across leering features crowned by cadaverous horns, so many hard spikes thrusting like obscene fingers from their skulls. Maul's broken voice echoed in his ears, promising a death lingering into hellish eons of suffering, the sallow irises of the ex-Sith burning with a manic lust for vengeance.

And all he had ever done was cut the _pizzmah_ in half.

Deservedly.

_Qui Gon._ A flicker of sorrow, a ghost of rage. He released them. Maul had taunted him, relished that one moment of imbalance when long-dead grief had been exhumed, resurrected from the past like the vanquished Sith himself. He would not give his enemy the satisfaction of wallowing in such dark passions. He would not hate. He would not hate even Maul.

May the Force so help him.

He would _not _ hate any of the Dark's victims. And that included Ventress, coiled beside him like an adder waiting to strike. If she had been sent to torment him with her foul presence, then he could be confident there was a lesson to be learned, a task to be accomplished. And once again, that impossible thought presented itself to his searching mind: the assassin had changed. There was an impalpable but real difference about her. Had Dooku perhaps cut her chain, loosed her into the galaxy like a cast off pet? She seemed more rootless, more feckless than ever. Her shadows were ones of weary ennui, not burning pools of Self where the Dark gnawed and smoldered. Had she renounced the ways of the Sith, only to wander the galaxy alone?

He squinted at her still form, a mere arm's width away. The Force affirmed his quiet reckoning. Yes. Ventress was aligned with nothing, and nobody. She was the absolute nadir of existence, the most pathetic life form the galaxy could ever produce. _Qui Gon. Master. I've my own collection now. Did you foresee that, too?_ Ventress, however, would never accept his pity, and certainly not his offer of reconciliation. Perhaps it was not his to make… but he found that a small part of him still needed to hope for it.

Because if Ventress could turn back, then the entire galaxy could. The scales of balance, tipped so portentously in the direction of Night, could swing, pendulum-like, back to their harmonious center, back into full Day. And the galaxy would have peace.

The emergency beacon endlessly blinked its forlorn message, the call for help echoing lonely over the icy waste, beneath the war-torn skies. Its gently pulsing light on the console panel was quietly hypnotic, a watchful cybernetic sentinel counting down the minutes of his weary shift, the seconds until a much-anticipated dawn. Obi Wan sunk into a healing trance and kept vigil alongside it, as the ice groaned around them on every side, prophesying disaster.


	4. Chapter 4

**Close Quarters**

* * *

**4.**

In the middle of the night, the ceiling caved in.

"Kenobi!" Ventress shrieked, feeling the vast grinding of glacial sheets around them, the mighty vise closing around their fragile sanctuary, thousands of tons of ice shifting, sliding, crushing the metal pod between their merciless jaws.

He was as rigid as she, the Force leaping between them, Dark and Light together, a solar flare of battle energy. They pushed, as one, outward and upward, straining against the sheer weight of death, against impossible odds. The capsule groaned; they groaned. The viewport shattered further, splintering into an opaque web of cracks, but not yet collapsing inward; the Force surged, they shuddered, cried aloud, fell to shaking knees, held disaster at bay for another trembling second.

The ice stopped shifting. The pressure ceased.

Asaaj gasped in shock as she slid down against the bulkhead, the roof now a scant meter from the floor, their tiny bubble of life reduced to a cave in which neither of them could even sit up properly. In the dark, Kenobi released a breath between clenched teeth. He must be hurting again.

She scrabbled fingers over the dead console."The beacon's still active," she reported. "Life support damaged… air cycler at fifty percent, the heating unit's gone."

"Lovely," the Jedi grunted, a thin undercurrent of pain running beneath his sarcasm.

"The insulation should hold out for a while," Asaaj decided.. The ship's thick hull was designed to conserve heat in the absolute void of space, after all. A bit of ice should not be too troublesome. The soon to be stale air was more problematic, but they were both trained, capable Force manipulators, _warriors._ They would not perish here.

She could hear her companion slide uncomfortably between the deck and the curving wall, the whisper of cloth against unyielding metal. That last effort had been severely taxing… she wondered whether they would have the combined strength to withstand another such crisis. The rescue team – be it Separatist, Republic, or mercenary – had better arrive _soon._

"Don't die on me, Kenobi." She needed him in case there was another shift in the ice. It would take then both to stave off destruction.

"Oh don't worry," he assured her, a tell-tale roughness edging his voice. "I plan to do _that_ in far better company."

She returned a hearty sneer in his general direction, hoping he would feel it in the Force. Arrogant barve. She really ought to kill him, as soon as they got out of this situation alive.

* * *

_A while_ turned out to be far shorter than either of them anticipated. Soon enough the cold had penetrated the twisted vessel's hull, and plunged them into sharp and needling discomfort. And the air… without the cycler at full capacity, it quickly thinned and staled to a smothering emptiness. Their chests heaved as though running, and headache stirred behind their temples. A slow trickle of perspiration ran down Obi Wan's neck, congealing in the cold air, chilling him further.

"Maul hates you," Ventress observed casually, breaking the long silence.

"And his brother seems to hate you," he replied.

"It's mutual," she assured him, tartly. "You mutilated Maul. I thought Jedi were above such violence." Mockery hung on every syllable, spiced her words with a burning aftertaste.

What had he done to deserve such tiresome company? "I had no choice," he answered, levelly. He hadn't. Not in the end.

"He killed your master," Ventress insisted, savoring the thought, her tongue tracing over her generous lips, her eyes slitting. "That _hurt._ I felt it when he accosted you in the ship."

He swallowed. Breathe. Of _course_ Ventress had felt his momentary slip, that instant in which he teetered again on the brink of the melting pit. But he hadn't fallen in this time. Never again. "It is in the past. Some losses must be accepted."

"So you didn't love him?" she inquired, a shiv delicately slipping beneath exposed ribs, separating soft tissue from bone, touching but not quite puncturing the trembling lung beneath.

_Jabiim. Naboo._ He suppressed both memories. "He told me to move on," he said, with an effort. Qui Gon's last words had been not sentiment but legacy. "And I did." Why was he confessing such things to Ventress, of all people? He must be half-delirious.

"I _loved_ Ky Narec," she told him, a whiplash accusation, a bitter compensatory blow across his façade of calm. "I will never move on. I will never forgive the Jedi excrement who left him to _die._ I am not a sycophantic weakling like you, Kenobi. I _hate. _ And it has brought me far."

"Ky Narec did not teach you hate,"" he pointed out.

She hissed, and a pale hand struck out in the dark, claw-like, talons flashing for his throat. He caught the wrist, squeezed hard. Their breath rasped in unison. The Force seethed with outrage. He released his bruising hold; she withdrew. Silence.

"My master knew Ky Narec," he offered after a brief truce, unable to truly surrender the battle once engaged. "They were friends, even."

"I don't need your kriffing _small talk,_ Kenobi."

"He was sorry to hear of his death. Master Narec would have been welcomed back into the Order's fold. There have been other such cases. It is never too late."

"Kriff off, I said!"

"You could do what he was unable to do... it would be a fitting legacy. Forgiveness is the sole prerogative of Light."

She slewed round, hands gripping the twin 'saber hilts, every muscle tense with expectation. He did not move, but his fingertips brushed the pommel of his own weapon, Soresu stormclouds already swirling invisibly in the Force, encircling his center, armor and shield. Lightning arced fleet between them, where shadow and radiance met, blurred into conflict, into a warm rainfall of possibility. The scales tipped, rolled sickeningly over their fulcrum, and back again.

"Are you trying to _reform_ me?" Ventress seethed, incredulity and revulsion bleeding into a murky haze of rage. "I would rather _die."_

"That seems likely enough in either case," he reminded her, dryly.

"If I'm going to die, Kenobi, it won't be begging you to absolve me." Her mouth parted, tongue running over the pale crescents of her teeth. She projected another image dredged up from the bottommost cellar of her squalid, lecherous soul, and he flinched.

Her soft chuckle of amusement stole warmth and sweet oxygen from the already morbid air. They wheezed and panted, in a soft counterpoint, lying an arm's width apart beneath the looming roof, beneath countless tons of ice.

"You know," Ventress whispered after a heavy interval, "_Dooku_ knew _your _master, too."

He sighed. "I am aware of that."

"We're in the same teaching line, Kenobi. I wonder what _lessons_ might have been passed down to you?"

"Not hatred," he assured her, wearily, feeling her mind nudging against his, a discreet mental probe burrowing beneath the walls of his shielding. His lungs ached, and his every bone was sore and throbbing. The probing _presence_ within his psyche was more than a little vexing… a subtle violation. He shut her out, with an effort that cost him a lapse in concentration better spent on other things. Pain flared along his side, where he had thus far managed to suppress it.

"What about love?" she insinuated. "It's the same thing in the end."

"He taught me compassion." _And patience. And forbearance. And discipline of the passions. And obedience._

Her imagination caught the tail end of the thought, fed it to her voracious appetites, transformed it into a satirical mirror image. "I'll bet he did," she purred lustily, squirming in place a little as she explored the idea to her own private satisfaction.

Obi Wan shifted, gasping in the freezing, too –thin air, presenting her with his back. He sealed his thoughts off in an impenetrable cocoon of Light, abandoning his healing trance in favor of a more vital protection. Let the Brothers' insults to his body strike deep and sure… he would not tolerate her prurient dissection of his soul. He turned within, nestling deep into the Force, leaving cold and pain, and Asaaj Ventress, far behind.

If he died, he would at least not _hate._ That would be enough.


	5. Chapter 5

**Close Quarters**

* * *

**5**

The night dragged on to a dawn that brought no comfort, no warmth or relief. The ceiling sagged yet further, slowly caving beneath the weight of the inexorable ice, until it bent inwards a hands-width from their bodies. The beacon blipped disconsolately, sluggishly as the generator gradually fizzled out, a voice crying in a wilderness without a single ear to hear it. Death circumscribed them, a narrowing circle about their trembling center, a cold halo about their unholy alliance.

Asaaj Ventress watched her breath congeal into soft gauze, into heavy mist. The bulkheads and viewport were slicked with frost, the solidified remnants of their last breaths. The slow-blinking beacon light suffused the tomb with just enough light to set the delicate puffs of air alight, dull blue nebulae swirling lazily in the frigid air. She glanced down at her own purpling fingers, numb and stiff as they were, as though looking at a corpse. Her pulse seemed to be knocking on the outside of the rumpled ball of metal, on the top of her skull as though someone were pounding for admittance. She nurtured a dark ember of hatred within her breast, a glowing coal strong enough to quicken her soul a little longer, to bind spirit to this slowly decaying fretwork of blood and bone. The cold was bitter, and absolute; but hatred was more so. It kept her alive, its heatless anger still thawing the ice in her veins. The Dark was more profound a nothingness than mere cold… more utter an extinction. She dallied with it, flirted within its familiar embrace. She was not yet prepared to die, though death it would seem was well prepared to take her.

She turned her head a few centimeters, squinting in the murky and stifling air. The Jedi was on his side, curled around his own center, eyes closed, breath shallow and grating in the close space. Frost bedecked his beard, drooping strands of hair, his lashes. She could hear his teeth rattling, the slight wheeze of pain in the wake of each inhalation. The Light moved, fulsome and fawning, over his compact frame, stirring the Force with a heatless radiance, a breath of mercy enough to hold the cold at bay a little longer. The Light was more profound a stillness than mere cold… more utter an extinction. It lingered about the Jedi, cleaving to his very marrow, blooming bright within his blood. If Kenobi died, he would barely feel it.

A howl of envy welled guttural in her throat. She swallowed it down, drowning it in the ember-pit of her heart. What did she care that the Jedi was _beloved_ of the Force, while she was the kicked nekk, the cast-off of destiny? Asaaj had always been betrayed, reviled, rejected. Ky had abandoned her. Dooku had abandoned her, the Sisters abandoned her, the very Dark abandoned her. She was the hollowed cadaver left by pillaging carrion birds, the Force's scavenging flocks, servants of _balance,_ of unfeeling justice. For every Kenobi, there must be a Ventress. For every star, a black hole. This was her fate: that of the counterbalance, the un-loved, the empty. She was the hungry, the needy, the wanting, the yearning, the void, the epitome of lonely appetite. She was the other Side.

She hated Kenobi for She hated him for his sickly, cloying, traitorous and double faced Light. She hated him for Being, when she was Un-Being.

He stirred, disturbed by her wrathful fretting, but he did not wake. She realized that her hands were yet again clamped hard about her sabers' hilts, and deliberately relaxed her grip. She needed him _alive, _ in case the ice shifted again. In case it was Dooku's minions who came to their rescue – then they would have to fight their way out together. In case it was another Jedi who responded to their beacon – then it might be Kenobi's preposterous belief in her possible _redemption_ that might mean the difference between instant death and a chance of escape. She needed him.

And she had him.

It was hellishly cold, as icy as Dooku's voice when he had consigned her to exile, cut her off from his tutelage forever, condemned her to a hunted existence. As icy as the glassy eyes of the Sisters, staring unseeing at Dathomir's blood-stained heavens after the massacre. As icy as the frozen pit in her heart when Ky Narec had been slain before her astonished eyes, cut down and left to die in her arms, her one Light ebbing away into the merciless Force, never to return, never to speak words of comfort and counsel ever again.

Abruptly, she slid across the slick deck, pressing her numbing limbs and torso against Kenobi. "Damn you," she hissed, awkwardly shifting his weight, shoving him into position, her clumsy fingers clawing into his injured side, into broken ribs. He whimpered, a sound that dripped molten through her, leaving a strange tenderness behind. She pressed closer, until she was wrapped front to back around him, one leg curling possessively over his hips, knee jostling against his 'saber, her hand searching beneath the frost-laden tunic for the fifth chakra, the kindling hearthfire above his navel. There was warmth trapped between them, the last vestiges of animal life, of stirring blood, the Force's vivifying spark within billions of cells. She warmed herself at that vestal fire, basking in a pure flame not her own, in borrowed Light. And it was good.

"Ky," she murmured into the reassuring stretch of shoulder muscle, stiff dark tunic fiber. "Don't leave me, Ky." The ice outside groaned ominously, to match the vast ache in her soul. She grazed teeth over a tiny meniscus of exposed neck, inhaling the scent of tenacious life, thawing frozen sweat into sweet-spice dampness. It bore the scent of Jabiim, and she arched into it, savoring the wine-dark recollection, drinking her fill of that time, that power and fleeting ascendancy. The needy, piercing cold beat at her back, all around them, but when her eyes slipped closed, she was afloat on a hot and roiling sea of memory, of black oblivion.

* * *

The Force shifted, in unison with the ice, splintering into jagged fragments, shards of warning and danger that brought Obi Wan jerking back into painful awareness.

_Flee. Flee._ His pulse hammered within his veins, threatened to split his head apart with its pounding. He hissed, groaned, struggled to break through the clotting dark into full consciousness.

Bitter cold, air that tore lungs to shreds, squeezed his diaphragm mercilessly. There was a weight coiled about him, atop him, a hand splayed possessively against his belly, a chill breath shuddering down the nape of his neck.

_Ventress!_ He choked out a few choice profanities, pushed feebly at the deadweight of her body draped across his own. For Force's sake! His fingers nudged at the place beneath his jaw where he could feel a spreading bruise, a _bite_ mark left by her Sith-forsaken teeth. She stirred, mumbled incoherently.

He elbowed her hard, in the side. "Ventress, _darling, _ get the hells off me."

She grunted and sucked in a sharp breath, feeling the shout of imminent danger, his acute disdain, the slap of renewed awareness.

_Flee. Flee. Flee. _ Something was approaching outside, burrowing through the frozen walls in their direction, homing in on their signal, on their scent. His heart skipped another beat, and he writhed, twisting in the cramped space. The roof now pressed in on them, wedging them together, unable to move. Ventress laughed, tightened her grip, the unwelcome hand sliding downward, her teeth sinking into the back of his neck again.

He bucked, hard, shoving her backwards against the impinging walls of their constricting prison, no more than a coffin's width of space rammed tight in the crushing ice. Spots danced before his eyes, vibrant splashes of color promising oblivion. He sucked in a breath, feeling the emptiness of it spear through his chest. Saber. His saber. Numb fingers curled about the familiar hilt, his thumb hovered over the activator. The thing outside drew nearer, nearer...

The crumpled wad of metal shifted, lurched. A rending of darkness, a tearing of the world into two halves, inside and outside sundered and then rejoined. The roof of the capsule was abruptly peeled off; a savage blast of obliterating cold, of sweet fresh air, jolted through them, ripped cries of alarm from their throats. A massive head, two curving walls of yellowed teeth, a pulsating crimson tongue, a howling maw putrid with rotting flesh, with the sickly sweet pungency of decay, opened wide to swallow them whole.

The Force roared with their mingled desperation. Three saber blades sprang into life. The monster lunged forward, ravenous, all-consuming.

And he knew in that instant that there would be no rescue.


	6. Chapter 6

**Close Quarters**

* * *

**6.**

Asajj Ventress screamed her outrage through starved lungs, echoing the ice beast's shrill and thundering howl. The Dark electrified her limbs, jolting cold fire through her blood. Two red blades leapt to meet the attack, twin lines of furious resistance carving molten through razored teeth, daggers of bone rattling down in a hail of burning pieces, clattering against the mauled remnants of the cockpit, bouncing off her body as she arched backward out of range. The monster's jaws clamped shut, bleeding, smoldering, where she had been a moment previously.

She landed on ice, slipped, skidded downward, sprang aside as an impossible mass of sleek body pounded into the hard-packed snow, sending up a shower of splintered white as it writhed, hotly seeking her flesh.

Kenobi appeared out of nowhere, plunging out of the grey sky onto the things' head, blade shrieking as it sank, to the hilt, deep in the creature's palpating flesh.

A roar to split the glaciers; the beast jerked its monstrous, yellow-eyed skull, and the Jedi went flying, landing inelegantly on his back at Asajj's feet.

The predator was enraged, but barely wounded. Kenobi twisted round, stretched out a hand, summoned his fallen saber back into his grip. Asajj found herself straddling him, a foot planted firmly to either side, as death made another downward sweep, saliva spattering on bluish frost, stench rolling against her in waves. This time she severed its crimson tongue. The soft worm of flesh thudded into the snow, sousing them in hot droplets, wonderful life-giving warmth, reeking gore.

She was slammed down, skidding facefirst into rock-hard ice, choking on blood and snow. The Dark laughed; her heart stopped, sensing destruction a meter away; and –

Kenobi must have struck it a searing blow, for there was only a bestial scream of pain that tore the Force into stark rage-stained tatters. She slewed round, eyes widening. The Jedi had sprung in front of her, saber blurring into a whirl of blue light. The beast reared up, nostrils flaring, colossal body quivering, a deep red-hot gash severing its flesh from its throat, long exposed strips of crimson-saturated fat dangling grotesquely beneath its pulsing jaws. It opened wide its mouth, as though to swallow the whole galaxy down, and fell upon its foe in a tidal wave of hungry wrath, blasting rot-drenched breath, shrieking like a damned soul.

The Jedi jumped _inside _ the ravening maw, and it snapped shut, ploughing into the ice with a violence suggestive of insane desperation.

Asajj gasped, rolled away, bringing her own weapons up in guard position, mind numb with shock.

The monster suddenly spasmed, throwing its entire mighty length to one side, twisting in a corkscrew death agony, shuddering. A geyser of red blood welled up out of its slackening jaws, gushing over truncated teeth, vomiting the Jedi back onto the ice in a soaking heap, weapon still clutched in his hand. The beast rolled, groaned, and subsided into swift death, its smooth hide glistening with snow, with its own entrails, with reflected morning light.

She slipped through puddles of crimson, snow thawing in the thing's heat, pools of seeping red. "Kenobi!" What a reckless _chosski, _ plunging his saber into its brain through the roof of its mouth. Only an _idiot_ would attempt such a manic feat of heroism. He wanted to die, clearly.

"Kenobi!" He had no right to die until _she_ no longer needed him.

The Jedi was on his hands and knees now, coughing up a little blood of his own, a souvenir of that rib burrowing its way into his lung. He was baptized in reeking filth, drenched red as her twin saber blades, hair plastered into a mess of clots and slick ribbons. She hauled him up, her own garments stained now with the same hot liquid. It felt _good-_ life, warmth, survival, victory, dominance. She laughed aloud with the glory of it, with the scent of _killing, _ predatory ecstasy.

Kenobi retched, gagging on the pervasive stink or on the Dark, or on both. Asajj didn't care.

"You owe me one," he muttered, prying himself free of her supporting grasp and staggering backward against the ice monster's hulking carcass.

"I'll pay you later," she promised, chest heaving, gut twisting at the sight of him, the acrid red staining, ruining his white tunics, his once-clean hands. It was …delicious. Seductive.

He only scowled back, despising her.

But she didn't care about that either. With the beast's death, they had seized for themselves another day of life. Another chance to cheat the cruel Fate which ruled the galaxy under the false and lying name of Light.

* * *

Obi Wan watched the brief twilight of day fade once again into freezing night. There had been little more than two hours of daylight, by his estimation. If he knew the angle of the planet's axial tilt, gravitational to magnetic, and its equatorial measurement, he could easily calculate at what latitude they were situated, assuming a rotation standard to its mass and stellar orbital position… his mind wandered idly over the formulae, things learned in the safe and protected harbor of the Temple, among other younglings as innocent as he had once been…

A long, long time ago. Before Naboo. Before Jabiim. Before now.

"Blast it." His last stunt with the behemoth had pushed his protesting body past its last limit, and it now stridently berated him for the excess. The Force washed cold and hot over him, blurred currents of shadow and light, flickering at the periphery of awareness like the weird echoes of Ventress' bonfire, the mighty beacon of burning fat and hide she had set to shine under the polar stars. The slain beast's blubbery flesh proved a powerful source of fuel, and oily smoke rose in dark pillars to meet the gentle radiance of the boreal lights in the sky, soft ribbons of color and luminance bedecking the frigid heavens.

It was warmth, and life. And it stank. He shivered, aware that his tunics had dried stiffly to his skin, every inch of them clotted with drying gore. Flakes of frozen blood drifted from hair and beard every time he ran a hand through them. Thawing ice had made a convenient means of bathing what skin he could reach, but there was no way to be fully cleansed of the stain and stench, not here in this pitiless wilderness.

In more ways than one, the creature had saved them. Its attack had pried the delicately balanced cockpit from its icy tomb, while its corpse now burned to keep them alive through the numbing stretch of darkness ahead. The monster had been a gift of the Force. One had only to _see_ this truth, to accept that some blessings came in unlikely guises.

He watched Ventress' boots, the only part of her visible from his present angle. If he chose to be honest, he would have to say that the vile assassin herself was a blessing in ugly disguise. Could he have survived the encounter with Maul and his brother alone? The crash? The ice? The beast? Likely not. On the other hand, he didn't feel like entertaining that particular point of view at the present and rather uncomfortable moment.

The Force was piercing ice and consuming magma, all at once. He groaned and let it take him, his mind slipping through its vastness with the slow fluidity of the northern lights overhead, the floating passivity of the smoke coiling its way up into starlit infinity. After a measureless interval, Ventress' blanched skull appeared in his blurry field of vision, her dark figure crouched over him like a carrion bird. Two long, bony fingers pressed against his left temple, questing.

"Don't _die,_ Kenobi," she hissed at him. "I might still need you."

Really, it was astonishing she hadn't seen fit to kill him already, considering his injury and the fabulous loneliness of this vista. What benefit was there in keeping a foe alive, when no common danger still united them – besides that of generalized, impersonal death at the hands of nature? He could not help her stave off the inevitable.

Unless…

A savage slash deepened between her brows, and her garishly stained lips puckered in distaste. "_Not _ so you can turn me back to your delusional, puling Light side," she sneered. "Don't get any damn-fool crusader's ideas."

He snorted, and it hurt. "Ah."

She stood, the sigils inscribed upon her shaven head cast in flickering contrast by the billowing columns of flame behind. Her pallid face peered, sharp and cunning, through the blackness. "We have company. Get up," she barked at him.

_Not good, not good._ He summoned the Force, pain and comfort, life and death, and found his feet, wobbling like a new-born bantha calf. His saber's hilt was flecked with the monster's blood, too, and he noted with a pang that he must clean it at the first possible opportunity. The 'saber was a Jedi's life. It should be kept pure, untarnished. Ventress drew near, back to back with him, her own weapons resting lethally in eager hands.

Their mighty bonfire of flesh, the beacon light shining in this barren wildland, had attracted someone. Many someones. The Force flared with many curious, wary, hostile presences, a ring of hunters, of seekers, their lives conjoined and flowing within the empty wastes like wind in a hollow cave, inseparable. Native. These would be neither Separatist nor Republic partisans.

In the wide circle of ghastly light, shadows danced. And the eyes materialized in a double-wide ring, an encircling audience peering at the two figures crouched warlike at its center. Tall, covered in thick veils of shaggy hair, adorned with bone jewelry, quadruple-eyed, long-clawed, powerful, those who belonged to this place stared at those who had intruded. Spears and primitive bows and long, thin implements resembling dart-tubes bristled on every side.

"There are too many," he murmured to Ventress, feeling her battle energy boiling to a crisis point. "We should negotiate."

The former Sith stiffened in contempt. "You do the talking, Kenobi. I'm not the chatty type."

Their reeking fire burned on, solemn witness to the parley. A huge white-crowned warrior stepped forward, through slush and red-soaked ice. It leaned on a mighty spear haft, two pair of obsidian eyes gazing steadily at them. One arm rose in silent signal, and a hundred weapons were raised in unison.

"What's your brilliant plan?" Ventress hissed, eyes darting back and forth among the tight circle of foes.

There weren't many options. To slaughter the rightful inhabitants of this world would only leave them freezing and starving on the tundra once again, without means of rescue. Brilliant was for another place and time. "We surrender," he said simply.


	7. Chapter 7

**Close Quarters**

* * *

**7.**

Asajj Ventress crouched outside the rounded hut, clutching the erk-skin tight about her shivering body. The Ice folk had granted her that much – though the ranks of sentinels had made it clear that she would _not_ be allowed inside the domed council-house. Apparently females did not merit such privilege in their backward culture. She ground her teeth and surveyed the bumbling occupants of this strange village through frost-laden lashes. They moved between and among the small, identical round dwellings, their own fur shaggier than the scrap of skin thrown to her out of pity. Stone ornaments hung from doorways – talismans? Magic amulets? Windchimes? Fires burned, illuminating the translucent skins of the roofs with orange, sulphurous yellow, flickering golds and reds. Blue shadows danced on the walls, distorted silhouettes.

She could kill them all, as punishment for their ready dismissal of her gender. Perhaps she would kill all the males, if she could discern which were which. It was by no means obvious, and the Force was too clouded with her own discontent to winnow out one from the other. Her hands caressed her weapons' hilts, sorely tempted.. But even a nice little massacre would do her no good, ultimately. Her prowling assessment of their home had revealed that they had no transportation technology, no comms, not even a scrap of circuitry or a power cell. They were _primitives._ There was nothing to take from them, but fire and food… and these, if Kenobi could be trusted, might be given them without a fight.

She snorted derisively. She _trusted_ Kenobi as far as she could throw him -which was, admittedly, about four or five meters, deadweight. The Force was a powerful ally, after all. She could hear his voice rise and fall inside the thick-walled shelter, its familiar cadence muffled by the layers of fur draped over the roof, and by the grunting and muttering of their captors. Hosts. _Things._ The language barrier did not seem to stand in Kenobi's way – perhaps his attunement to the Force was even subtler than she realized. Certainly he was astute at interpreting _her _ unspoken thoughts… She stamped her feet to keep her circulation moving and strained to hear the words exchanged within the solemn confines of the meeting tent, keeping warm in the heat of the two sentinel torches burning brightly outside its entrance.

At last , the tribal procession worked its way up the sloping entrance from the sunken interior of the dome. The chieftain and several others passed her without so much as a sideways glance, their attendant warriors keeping a wary eye on her but saying nothing, double pairs of glassy black eyes staring, inscrutable, at her exotic appearance. Kenobi came last, wrapped in a far more generous scrap of erk-fur, the whole pelt of an adult male, magnificent in its spotted and silken expanse.

"Well?" she demanded sourly when the sober parade had ascended the stairs into the outside world, where snow gently drifted from a leaden sky.

"The tribe has offered us hospitality," he informed her. "At least, for a day and a night. They are grateful for the kill of the Selpe-jja. It will feed them for many weeks."

Her lip curled in disdain. "A day and a night? That's what your famous diplomatic skills bought us? I'm unimpressed."

He grinned, a radiant irony. "They offered to buy you, as well, but I told them I was unwilling to part with you until I finished taming your indocile temperament."

Asajj spat in the compresed snow between their booted feet. The barve. Before she killed him, she would make sure he _parted_ with certain prominent assets. "So we're stuck here for a day. Then what?"

The Jedi gazed up speculatively into the dull heavens, where battle still raged behind the veil of overladen cloud.. "We wait for a solution to fall out of the sky. In the meantime, I am quite looking forward to a bath. And _you," _ he wagged a finger under her nose, with all the arrogant authority of a master chiding his errant Padawan. "Will not lay a hand on our new friends. Your thoughts betray you – there will be _no_ killing spree."

She leered back at him. "Don't worry," she softly growled. "If there's a killing spree, _you_ will be the first to know." She meant it. And he knew she meant it. They remained locked in a silent understanding, perfect resentment, for a space of three heartbeats.

Kenobi jerked his head toward a longhouse a stone's throw away. "That is the women's shelter, where food is prepared. I suggest you avail yourself of its benefits. Your wit is starved for nourishment, Ventress _dear."_

And off he went, the erk-skin trailing regally in his wake, the 'saber's hilt slapping tauntingly against his left thigh, the Light frolicking smugly in his footsteps. She made a gargoyle face at his back and consigned him to a thrice-deserved damnation in all the nine Sith hells, before wheeling about and storming away in the opposite direction.

* * *

No sooner had Obi Wan set foot within the dome-shaped ice hut provided for his comfort by their obliging hosts, than he was sinking to his knees in meditation posture. The Force's borrowed strength had sustained him through the encounter with the giant monster, the ensuing lonely trek to this isolated native settlement, and the challenging negotiations with a people whose language he did not understand; now it drained swiftly from his limbs, his grasp on its luminous power loosening as a tired child drops its favorite plaything at the moment of sleep.

Limp, he knelt and breathed. The curving inner surface of the hut was slick with thaw; furs and pelts covered the floor in a thick layer; the air inside was warm, irresistibly soothing. In the center, a rough hewn pit had been filled with steaming water. The rim of this improvised basin was gradually eroding, crumbling into the hole and widening the pit into a depression intriguingly similar to a bathing tub. Steam rose and condensed on the low ceiling, dripping back into the pool with a gentle and seductive chiming.

Vaguely, he wondered whether the Ice people had seen fit to provide Ventress with such luxurious accommodations, but he was far too weary to fret over the question for longer than a fleeting moment. With a colossal effort, he dragged his drooping eyelids open again and stripped off his grime-stiffened clothing. Pain rippled in vibrant waves beneath his ribcage, eliciting a sharp hiss. He cautiously slid into the pool, ducking beneath its exquisitely hot surface, reveling in the pure and piercing heat for a full minute before rising again with a gasp of unmitigated animal pleasure. _Oh, Force…_

There was someone else within the shelter.

"Shall I join you?" Ventress purred, arms crossed smugly over her ample bosom.

"I don't think so. And what are you doing here at all?"He suddenly regretted the recent – and foolish - pang of sympathy that had desired similar accommodations for his uninvited companion.

The assassin settled comfortably upon a pile of furs, her lithe body arching suggestively against the soft cushioning. She smiled, dark lips parting to reveal a thin dagger blade of bone-white teeth. "They seem to think I'm your concubine," she informed him blithely, with a shrug of utter indifference.

His mouth twisted in wry disapprobation , but he made no comment upon this manifest absurdity. It took a few minutes of diligent effort to scour the clinging remnants of beast-gore from his hair and beard. Aware that Ventress was minutely surveying his every movement, he discreetly called his 'saber closer to the pool's edge. Just in case.

"Do you _mind?"_ he scowled when he had finished.

"Not at all," she leered, waiting expectantly.

With a deep sigh of resignation, he heaved his aching body out of the bath's delicious warmth, summoning an erk pelt into his outstretched hand and deftly wrapping it about his waist. It took supreme discipline to ignore the lascivious moan of appreciation from Ventress' end of the all-too-small domicile.

"That rib must hurt," she remarked, gutturally, tilting her bald head back to get a better view of his bruised torso.

One of his brows twitched upward. "I've endured worse," he reminded her, flatly.

"I know," she growled, voice rich with twisted nostalgia.

Obi Wan turned his back and donned another hide, drawing its heavy folds about his shoulders and easing himself down on the far opposite side of the domed shelter, keeping his 'saber in easy reach. Soporific warmth, mind-numbing pain, Ventress' nauseating desire… all blended into a heady narcotic mixture, a compelling need to relax, to succumb to his need for rest. Sleep, a deep healing trance: he needed both, but found himself reluctant to yield, not with _her_ unwelcome presence so close at hand.

"What's the matter?" the ex-Sith cooed at him. "Don't you _trust_ me, Kenobi?"

"I wonder why not," he muttered, consciousness finally dissolving into a blur of exhaustion, pain, and protective swaddling Light.

The last thing he heard was Ventress' sensuous chuckle.


	8. Chapter 8

**Close Quarters**

* * *

**8.**

The sudden commotion outside stirred Asajj Ventress into wakefulness. She wriggled free of the Dark's cloying embrace, severing her soul from its gluttonous meditation, and listened. The Ice folk were in an uproar, and the Force seething to match the clamor without. Though not a word of their language was meaningful to her, the vibrant medley of images and razored fear lancing through the plenum were enough to startle her into immediate concern. The village scouts had seen a ship crash – a blazing apparition plummeting from the heavens above. And they had seen _things…._ creatures of hard-flesh, crustacean- people, moving across the ice in spreading legions.

Droids. It must be. The Separatists had a ship downed in this region, and now their surviving forces were marching across the wastes, soon to happen upon this defenseless village. So it would come down to battle– both she and Kenobi were wanted dead by Dooku, and so both she and the Jedi would _fight_ their way free of the threat, wreaking glorious carnage on the pathetic scrap-piles her former master deigned to call soldiery.

She glanced at Kenobi, obscured beneath a hefty pile of erk-skins… but when the palpable disturbance in the Force failed to rouse him, she wondered whether he had in fact died in the lonely stretches of the endless polar night.

She crawled across the space and nudged him, half expecting to feel the stiffening cold of a corpse; but the skin beneath her fingers was hot to the touch, damp with sweat. A _fever._ Her mouth convulsed into a tight curve of displeasure. How like a man – always helplessly self-involved when they were needed the most.

With a snarl of frustration, she set to shaking him mercilessly by the shoulders. "Wake up, damn you!"

The resulting explosion of power sent her sprawling across the icy interior of the hut, skidding into the curved wall. The Jedi glared across the dim interior, the dwelling's one small glowlamp casting weird blue shadows over its concave inner surface. He lay half-twisted about, panting, teeth gritted. "Don't _touch_ me."

Asajj disentangled herself from the furs and scattered floor coverings. "There are _droids_ on their way here," she hissed at him, contemptuously. "I hope you're prepared to fight."

"Droids," he repeated, rolling onto his back with a stifled groan. "Lovely."

She was on her feet, pacing restlessly across the hard-packed floor of their shelter. "Your shaggy friends will be slaughtered, of course," she reminded him, knowing that _this_ would galvanize him more surely than any threat to his own person. "They only possess primitive weapons."

The Jedi rewarded this suggestion with a deep frown. He really looked like chizzsk, now that she studied his visage carefully. As though in confirmation of this objective assessment, he turned to one side and coughed up a faint trickle of blood, sucking in sharp and labored breaths between spasms. "I've seen better days," he muttered painfully.

She ended her prowling ambulation in a crouch beside him. "Too bad," she snapped, grabbing a handful of hair and yanking his head back in her direction. "You need to help me. We stand a better chance of saving our own skins _together."_

The Jedi closed his eyes, corrosive exhaustion flooding through the Force. "You mean saving this _village,"_ he corrected, blearily.

Asajj rolled her eyes. Ridiculous. Kenobi struggled valiantly to rise, but he almost immediately collapsed again, one hand clutching hard at his injured side, face draining to a ghastly white. She ground her teeth together. _How_ could this be happening? _How _ was this fair? The image of Dooku's hell-haunted eyes, of his _face,_ when the droids presented him with the blaster-riddled corpses of herself and Kenobi… the contemplation of his wicked delectation was too much. She smothered her scream of rage in her throat, shuddering with hate, with a gutted emptiness to match the tundra outside. It was _intolerable_ that she find herself in such a situation.

"….Will of the Force," the Jedi ground out, still trying to _teach_ her even as he lay slowly drowning in his own blood, impaled on his own bone. The delusional fool. He deserved his fate, if he was so passive and weak, such a sniveling _obedient _ little cretin.

Asajj was not. She was stronger than the Dark which had cast her off. She was stronger than the Light which had abandoned her. She was the ruler of her own destiny, subject to the whims neither of evil nor of good. She could help whom she chose, and betray whom she chose. It made no difference, for in her hollow universe there was no longer any Rule of Two. There was only herself and her right to defy fate unto her last breath. And today, she would defy it again.

"Kenobi," she said. "I'm going to help you."

Silence.

"I can heal your rib. I've… learned… _ways._ Things you don't know."

His revulsion was a cold wind, a hurricane of righteous indignation that choked the words off in her throat. She pushed through it, clawing through the scouring Light, shouting to make herself heard over his furious, wordless refusal.

"_Idiot!_ If you don't accept my help, you will die. And all your precious _villagers_ will die. Because of your vile, Jedi _pride!"_

For a moment, she thought she might be extinguished in the wild flare of his defiance; but when the initial consuming blast had subsided, she was looking into a pair of eyes shining hard, glittering with the luminous penumbra of some deep, internal battle. Asajj licked her lips, waited, her eloquence spent, poured out in one long impassioned moment. Truth was a fickle, an untrustworthy ally, a trickster and a cunning magician, loyal to none, as mercenary as she herself now was.

And it was the only thing in the galaxy that could break Kenobi's indomitable will.

He heaved in a pained breath, gaze as bright and searing as his 'saber's blade. "Very well," he grunted, closing his eyes as though sickened by the very notion. "Do your worst."

Temptation needled through her, igniting dormant flames in her blood, flooding through memory and imagination in titillating waves .. but the droids were coming, mindless and inexorable. This time, the choice was not Dooku's, but her own. This one time, she chose life rather than death, healing rather than suffering.

Just this _one_ time.

* * *

Obi Wan flinched, before she even laid a finger upon him.

Ventress' breath wafted over his hair, her dark laughter caressing his skin. "Remembering something else?" she inquired, soft as the erk-skin blankets she so _slowly, _ so _tenderly,_ pulled away, until there was nothing between them but foul memory and the impossible present moment.

He shivered, cold air prickling over exposed skin, evaporating the drenching brought on by fever.. "Just get on with it." It was perhaps better if he did not look at her tattooed face, her glinting eyes. Focus. Relax.

"I'm going to _touch_ you," she warned, sardonically. "_Don't _ throw me across the room, Obi Wan, dear.'

He _hated_ it when she used his proper name. He flinched again when she _did_ touch him, but he managed not to throw her across the shelter's narrow width. And then he grunted, as she pressed bony fingers into the center of his pain, digging into hot, bruised flesh, the place where his bone had been crushed inward, dislocated and fractured. "_Careful,"_ he hissed, in acute vexation.

"Be quiet and cooperate," she barked at him, apparently channeling Vokara Che.

He exhaled, choked on liquid burbling deep in his chest, coughed it up. Pain. Lots of it. And droids on the horizon…and behind them, more droids, and more. Dooku would empty his foundries, his warehouses, his own bottomless coffers, to find and kill him and Ventress in one fell swoop. He needed to _fight. _ He needed Ventress' help. Her hands probed over the injury, merciless, inflicting more pain. He gritted his teeth. Help; she was _helping. _Not Jabiim. Not the past. Here. Now.

Ventress took a deep breath, her presence strangely wavering, blurred at the edges, melting into shadow, into twilit haze. Sickly power coiled about her, morbid and electrifying. Her eyes rolled back, exposing pale red-veined undersides. She shuddered, and then relaxed.

The urge to throw her across the room trebled in intensity. His right hand slipped downward, curled around the cool hilt of his saber, safely nestled by his thigh. The crystal within pulsed, responding to him, chiming in the Light, sonorous, pure-toned. This _must_ be done; he could not permit Dooku's forces to run rampant over the indigenous tribes, over their hosts.

"Lower your shields," Ventress commanded, still _touching_ him.

He swallowed. Oh, no. _Force, _no.

"Do as I say," she snarled, "Or I can't _help_ you!"

This was the trouble with healing: badly compromised, one could not manage for oneself. And involving someone else meant accepting a degree of vulnerability which he personally found _irksome _ under the best of circumstances – say, in the Temple's medical ward – and utter anathema under present conditions. Besides, Ventress was apprenticed to the Dark, to the Night Sisters, to stars knew what other forgotten and reviled domains of occult lore. He was in no way eager to let such filth pollute his soul, even for a moment.

In short, he didn't trust her.

But was that … wrong? The Force trembled a little, just beyond the horizon of thought, new wisdom dawning reluctantly in a pain-streaked sky. Because surely Ventress did not trust the Light, either; and his request that she _commit_ herself back to its service also involved a vulnerability she found offensive, untenable. He asked her to repudiate the only safety and fastness she knew – that of hatred – and to leap, on purest faith, back to the salutary and whole, the luminous Side. He held out a hand, inviting, demanding _trust…_ and yet could not return the gesture.

"Well?" she spat at him between clenched teeth, impatient.

_Blast it all to the…_ . "Yes – all _right,"_ he snapped. _Force help me._

And against all odds, in flagrant defiance of both their expectations, suddenly enough to elicit a gasp of surprise from either one, he surrendered, flattened his mental defenses, laid himself at her mercy … and let her in.


	9. Chapter 9

**Close Quarters**

* * *

**9.**

Asajj Ventress knew things Kenobi did not. Her path had taken her many places… dark detours off the course of destiny, strange side tours into shadow realms no Jedi would ever dare tread. Dooku's miserly tutelage had left her with secret knowledge; Mother Talsin had poured forbidden wisdom into her willing ears; and the school of Life had drilled her in more bitter lessons. There were many ways to _heal, _to _survive _ and _endure_ than those proper to the Light. Maul was grotesque proof of that; compassion and wholeness could bring health; but hatred and imbalance could also heal, lick their own wounds into scabrous armor, hardened places that would never be pierced again.

She slid under the Jedi's shields, penetrating beneath memory, thought, emotion, a tapestry of complexities and conundrums, a veritable Rishi Maze of secret and vastly compressed yearnings, raw mineral slowly forged into pure crystal by discipline, by will, by submission, by suffering, by the Force. It was…nauseating. A place of stillness and pressure and infinities, a sanctuary and temple to the Light which she felt _watching, _ sentinel-like, over her shoulder, a stern and coruscating whisper breathing that she should not _harm_ what she found here, its painstaking handiwork, that she was a trespasser and trod on hallowed ground.

She pushed onward, and felt Kenobi tense beneath her hands. The encounter was not pleasant for either of them.

She gripped his arm tightly, digging in with slightly trembling fingers, woozy with the turgid churning where Light and Dark met, pooled together in uneasy tangles, oil and water unwilling to mix. _It's all right, darling._

He writhed away, fleet blue lightning severing them for an instant, reflexive shielding repelling any assault. Asajj hissed, pain erupting behind her temples. "Stop it, you kriffing son of a slatternly gundark!" She channeled the pain, rebounding it back into his side, into his bleeding lung, shattered bone. Hate. Hate could heal, hate could _teach._

The Jedi released another tiny noise of distress, a choked-off cry that hardened in her bowels, melted hate into a strangely protective ferocity, into determination. She would do this, and they would survive, to fight. To fight and flee, and live on. And eventually she would kill him, but not now. Now was… different. Her fingers twitched, stroked, soothed. She gathered the Power – the Night, not the Dark, things shown her by Mother, by the Sisters, by the bonds which excluded all _otherness, _all _males, _the Brothers, Dooku, Kenobi, all of them. Birth happened at Night; Night was the origin of squalling life, blood and breath and the vital, pulsating union of womb and embryo, of the gross matter which held spirit captive, enthralled, bound to time and place and cruel choice. Night was hers to command, to direct. It ran liquid in her veins, poured through both of them in a primordial flood.

Like birth, Night healing hurt. Kenobi groaned, but she ignored it, panting through the labor pangs of this new endeavor. Her inward vision blurred into striating greens, murky luminous threads of power. Pain exploded between them, indifferent to identity, seeping through lowered shields, across boundaries, heedless of self and other, uniting Day and Night in a seamless equinox, a scintillating conjunction.

And Asajj once again held Ky Narec in her arms, held Qui Gon Jinn in her arms, as the Jedi master's life leached from his limp body, as his radiance failed, as her father died in her helpless embrace, as she howled out her soul into the Dark, as she howled out her soul into the Light, as rage erupted into vengeance, as rage melted into stunned acceptance, as she was left alone in the void, as she was left alone in omnipresent plenitude, as Destiny crashed down on young and weeping shoulders.

Pain was a wellspring of life, and life of pain. They were one thing. The body was armor and vehicle, and wellspring of pain, too; and also a thing knit of sweat and tears, of the galaxy's endless birth-pains. She pulled Kenobi's rib back into alignment, compacted seeping marrow and crushed bone into solidity, bound the shredded fragments of muscle and tissue into place, mended the soft gash in his lung, scoured clotting blood from its aching vessel, suffused the whole mess with new energy, the feral, untamed glory of animal _life._

And when she had finished, she collapsed backward in exhaustion, rolling away from the Jedi, from the Power, from the fact of her accomplishment. "Oh, Ky."

* * *

Hours later, or possibly minutes, he awoke.

Obi Wan sat up gingerly, eyes widening in wonder at the discovery that debilitating pain had smoothed into distant ache, mere tenderness and soreness. His fingers strayed over his side, questing… and indeed, Ventress had succeeded, as well as any Temple healer could have. He was compelled to give credit where it was due.

The former Sith was coiled upon the fur-rugs nearby, like a napping felix, an eerie and foreign power still faintly tinging her aura. He was reminded of Dathomir, of Talsin's twisted coven; and the exotic stench suffusing the Force on that shadowed world. He found that he did not _want_ to know exactly what arts Ventress had employed to bring them to this new and happier state of affairs. The present moment would suffice for him, now. That was a lesson learned early, if not well. Sometimes he managed to honor Qui Gon's teachings; this would be one of those occasions.

An experimental breath revealed that he was not yet entirely whole; but the improvement was considerable. He closed his eyes, settled into meditation posture, sank into the cleansing currents of the Light as gratefully as he had availed himself of the ice-pool earlier.

Hours, or possibly minutes later, Ventress awoke, uncurling with the lethal grace of the same imagined felix, her slanted eyes seeking over the confines of the domed shelter, coming to rest upon him in uncertain expectation.

For a moment, they simply stared at one another, the Force thrumming faintly between them, the subliminal growl of a saber's blade, when it was held motionless in cold, still air. For a moment, within that ethereal luminance , he was looking not at the scarred and stained and leather-clad assassin, nor the Dark acolyte, nor the despairing cynical bounty-hunter, but merely a young and lost girl. The veiled eyes that peered back into his soul, as through a mirror's polished lens, were bright with a strange perception; and he wondered, heart skipping a beat, at what parallel mystery lay revealed to their piercing scrutiny.

But the Force was ever in motion, and a welcome veil drifted between them again, cleaving the Sides asunder, restoring the wonted balance of things.

Good manners were less perilous than revelation. "Thank you." He inclined his head.

"You're welcome," she replied, insincerely. The acidity of her tone was almost a relief.

There was but a meter's space between them, and in this claustrophobic interval, trust fit snugly, a fragile yet beautiful ephemera. He dared hardly breathe, for it would surely dissolve at the first stirring of tension.

It was Ventress who broke the delicate bubble. It evaporated like their clouding breath, disappearing into the frigid polar air. "I don't _owe_ you one anymore," she snapped, waving an admonitory finger at him. We're _even."_

She owed him nothing; her debts lay elsewhere. He had long ago discharged her of the vast abominations of Jabiim- for there could be no true reckoning of such an account. If subtle fault lines remained, he would exact no payment, only seek healing in the Light. Let Ventress sue for pardon where she most needed it, in the Force itself.

She was watching him sourly; he strengthened his shields again, widening the gap between their perspectives, until they once more stood diametrically opposed, ranks lined up across the motley field of a dejarik board. Silently, he recovered his worn clothing. Somebody had washed it – inexpertly, ineffectively… but at least it no longer stank of blood and gore. He cast a sideways glance at Ventress, but decided not to ask. The present moment. There was a good deal to be said for tightening one's focus to a blazing absolute.

Their heads jerked toward the entrance in unison, responding to the vibrant disturbance in the Force. The Ice folk were astir; invaders approached.

"The droids," Ventress exclaimed, leaping to her feet, twin saber blades already clutched in sinuous, tendon-knotted hands.

Outside, dawn teetered precariously on the horizon, tinging the snow-mountains crimson, heralding the brief polar day. Snow flakes whirled and pelted against them as they made their way from the security of the hut into buffeting wind. The villagers were roused to battle, spears and bows waving in hairy paws, echoing war-cries carrying over the ice-strewn waste.

Obi Wan pushed to the settlement's edge, the erk-skin flapping wildly in the bitter wind, Ventress doggedly ploughing through the snow in his wake. A line of defenders were arrayed about the pike-wall surrounding the village. In the dim and storm-clouded distance, an army of newcomers approached,. The Force seethed with the tribe's territorial ferocity, their fear and wonder. Violence gathered itself, ready to spring, lurking just out of sight, behind the curtains of sleet and hail.

The invaders drew near, arrayed in clanking pallid armor, in hard plates and glinting planes of non-flesh, weapons bristling. The two armies faced off, squinting through obscuring white, battered by ravenous wind. Spears were raised, blasters drawn, commands screamed shrill through ice-parched throats.

Obi Wan leapt, saber blazing beacon-bright through the grey haze, the deafening noise, to stand between the two lines.

"Hold your fire!" he bellowed, to natives and intruders alike, pounding against their mutual hostility with a sustained wave of Force-borne command, desperate injunction.

The invading forces were not droids, but Republic troops.


	10. Chapter 10

**Close Quarters**

* * *

**10.**

Asajj Ventress' knuckles whitened about the curved handles of her weapons. She had been betrayed, yet again. By the very Force. By the ironic, laughing Light. She _should_ have killed Kenobi when she had the chance; she should have massacred the Ice people when she first arrived. For if _this_ were to be her ending, the consummating moment of her struggles and travails, she would rather make it one to remember.

And it had been her own mistake.

She had _felt_ the scouts' confusion, their inchoate representation of the oncoming hordes. Primitives, savages without experience of the broad galaxy beyond their own blanched plain of existence, they had seen the plasticarbon –armored clones as lifeless automata, as machines or insects. It was her own dread and anger that had translated this raw perception into an erroneous conclusion. It had not been a Separatist ship, but a Republic cruiser that had fallen from the battle ravaged sky.

She watched the Ice folk murmur, jostle together. She watched the Jedi speak with the clone Commander. She watched the distant horizon, burning with the sun's brief daytime flare. She watched the troops arrayed behind their officers, some on swoops, many on foot, faces utterly concealed behind helmets, thermal masks, the façade of collective calm they projected unwittingly in the Force.

The Jedi master turned at last, snow fretting his beard, piled heavily on the erk-skin cloak. His skin was tinged as pale as the drifting flakes, blue with cold, with vestiges of illness. He held out a hand. "Ventress, my dear, you had better come quietly."

She laughed, cold amusement filling the hollow places in her soul, the interstices where, a moment earlier, seeds of trust had fallen upon fertile soil. The germinating sprouts withered, shriveled into blackness beneath the onslaught of her frosty contempt. "I'll come with you… to the _hells," _ she promised him, blades spitting into life, haloed by spattering light where the snow met the merciless beams of red.

There might have been the faintest sigh of disappointment in the Force, but the thundering drum of her pulse drowned it out, trampled it into the gritty ice. She launched herself at her foe, blades screaming in dissonant chorus. Blue fire sprang to meet her assault; snow withering to hot steam about the sabers' flashing edges.

_Hate_ welled like a spring, hate for the seductive trap into which she had been lured, unwitting, like a foolish child. For a damning moment she had _trusted_ the Jedi, dared to hope that his offer of reconciliation was more than empty mockery, fallen headlong into his mewling milksop delusion, his obscene and repulsive _belief_ in the mercy of the Light.

That Light would burn a hole in his heart someday, an excoriating wound no healer could ever cure. She _saw_ it and she howled with it, enraged at the universe, at fate, at the awful tyranny of existence which robbed her of every master, every friend, every sure center. She drove against Kenobi with a hatred equal in measure to his maniacal _faith, _ and drowned in her own rage. Red blades slashed, whirled, scattered ice to instant destruction, carved through his defenses, crashed against his counter-attacks, crossed and cut and lunged inward, sideways, backwards, a paroxysm of bitter wrath.

They parted, knee-deep in slush melted by the thrumming sabers, Light and non-Light, healer and healed, victim and tormentor, master and masterless, tradition and rebellion, hope and despair, locked in an excruciating stalemate beneath an aborted dawn.

"Surrender, Ventress!" Kenobi hollered at her. "It's not too late!"

She laughed in his face, drowning in his pleading eyes, in everlasting defiance. He was Kenobi, he was Dooku, he was Ky Narec, he was every treacherous Jedi bastard who had ever betrayed her, slaughtered the Sisters, abandoned their own, sunk on bended knee before Sith or Council. He was both Sides, either Side, the Force itself. "It's too late for _me, _ master!" she screamed.

"Ventress!"

"I'll _die_ first, Kenobi!"

She raised her twin blades, opened her soul to endless night, to obliterating peace. The clack of fifty Republic heavy rifles lifted into position, trained on her flesh, resounded through the aching silence. So it would be an execution. She leered at the Jedi, at his pained grimace of victory, his heaving chest, the 'saber burning merciless in his hand.

The troops waited for the order. She would kill half of them before she dropped in her tracks.

"Hold your fire," Kenobi ordered for the second time, looking her directly in the eyes.

Asajj gaped, accepted his surrender, his _forgiveness, _ and flipped over the obedient, forbearing clones, onto an empty swoop, rocketing away across the barren tundra, putting as much distance as possible between herself and the face of an enemy who had utterly, irrevocably confounded her.

* * *

"Is there anything else you will require, sir?" the dutiful clone petty officer inquired, standing at rigid attention just outside the wrecked cruiser's malfunctioning cabin doors. "Ah… food? A medical droid? The sick bay is still fully functional."

Obi Wan raised one eyebrow. "No – that won't be necessary." The memory of Ventress' touch ghosted over his flesh. Frowning, he glanced down at his dreadfully uncivilized attire. "However – a change of clothing would be most welcome."

The clone cast a shrewdly estimating glance at him, obviously calculating the proper sizes, and then saluted. "That should be simple, sir. I'll return shortly."

"Thank you." He did not sag against the frame of the broken pressure hatch until CT-675432 had disappeared from view, trotting down the corridor to fulfill the promise of freshly laundered fatigues. A droid or two buzzed down the hallway in his wake; the tramp of other booted feet could be heard in adjacent corridors, the decks above this level.

The ship had crashed with minimal damage to its essential systems; and a rescue and repair team was already on its way, the battle in orbit resolved in the Republic's favor. Obi Wan could optimistically expect to be back on Coruscant within two standard days, his recent misadventures truly at their end. Though hardly _finished,_ from any point of view one chose to adopt. Maul's quest for revenge could not be considered nullified; and the ex-Sith and his brother still roamed the galaxy, free to wreak whatever havoc they saw fit. And Ventress: she too was at large…. And that was problematic. Because _he _had given that fateful order himself, been willing accomplice to her escape.

He ran a hand over his beard, tugged a little at his chin. Would innocents die because of that choice? The Force held its tongue, neither chastening nor comforting. The future was elusive.

Commander ..what was his name? Gree?… appeared in his turn, the Kaminoan armor accented with a splash of color here and there, signifying rank. His dark eyes were troubled, but he presented himself with perfect formality, looking at an unfocused spot just over Obi Wan's left shoulder, not quite daring eye contact yet.

"General Kenobi," he said, stiffly. "I must submit the official mission report to the Admiral at fourteen hundred standard. Shall I indicate that the assassin escaped before our forces could arrest her?"

Obi Wan moved into the man's line of vision. "No," he replied softly. "You will report that your men obeyed my order to hold fire, and that she commandeered one swoop and fled the scene. Also that I commend your squadron for their exact compliance with orders."

Gree nodded, his amber eyes finally shifting to the Jedi's face, relief softening the hard lines at their corners. "Yes sir, General. Thank you, sir," the clone said.

He bowed, and the clone saluted. The Commander hesitated one moment. "Ah, General?"

"Yes?"

"May I ask, sir, what you were doing out there? We weren't notified of any Jedi presence dirtside."

"There was no flaw in your intelligence," Obi Wan assured him. "My presence was the result of… an unintended detour."

"I see," Gree answered, too wise to press any further. "Thank you, sir." He saluted again and took his leave, just as his compatriot had a few minutes earlier.

The cruiser was huge… empty. Though hundreds of living beings milled about its hivelike interior, he felt oddly alone, isolated in the Force. A side effect of too much time spent at close quarters with a rather overwhelming personality, he supposed. Although, given his habitual proximity to Anakin, anyone would think he should be quite used to it by now.

He turned back to the interior of the clean cabin assigned respectfully to his sole use, and concentrated on polishing off the last bits of tarnish marring his saber hilt. The mundane task was soothing, a meditation, an anchor line back to normalcy – whatever that meant in time of universal war. When he returned to the Temple, he would inform the Council that the Brothers were on the prowl, a threat to peace and order to be numbered among the countless other plagues afflicting the crumbling Republic. He would inform them that Asajj Ventress was no longer Dooku's minion, but was still unpredictable and dangerous, a force to be reckoned with.

And he would confess to Yoda, or perhaps Mace, what he had done and what he had failed to do. And he would dutifully fulfill whatever demands of penance or healing were laid upon him, knowing that he had abstained from delivering the killing blow, that he had chosen an unlikely mercy. That he trusted the Force to resolve what his conscience could not fully fathom. If his cowardice thereby somehow brought the galaxy to ruin, he would not deny responsibility for the act. Nor would he regret it.

He examined the flawlessly shining saber hilt for a long moment, and decided that it was clean.

And that was, he admitted to himself, a small but very real comfort.

FINIS


End file.
